Around a month ago, WWE decided to inject some life into its women’s division on Friday Night SmackDown by calling up three wrestlers from NXT who were clearly ready for a brighter spotlight — Tegan Nox & Shotzi Blackheart came up as a tag team while Toni Storm was called up as a singles wrestler. In the case of Shotzi & Nox, they made an instant impact, beating the women’s tag team champions and they’ve been a steady presence on television ever since.
Not so for Storm.
Toni, despite the fact that she got weeks of teasers promoting her main roster debut, showed up, beat Zelina Vega, who had just returned to the company herself, and seemed to establish herself as a top contender right out the gate. Instead, she immediately disappeared from television for the next two shows.
What makes that even stranger is the fact that Vega was on TV the next week demanding a title shot from Bianca Belair and was about to get one before Sasha Banks returned and it turned into a tag team match. Then, just this week, she got a “championship contender’s match,” a new buzzword WWE is using to promote non-title matches, against Belair.
She lost all of those times, of course. But she at least got on television and was involved. Storm, who had just beaten her, is nowhere to be found.
It doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad happened or she’s not still in the plans for later, it just makes the decision to promote her call up for weeks and give her a win confusing when she just instantly disappeared right after. If she wasn’t factored in for SummerSlam, why not just wait until after to bring her up?
Let’s hope all is well and she’s back sooner rather than later.